Hi
How do i back up my entire OpenBSD system to an external usb drive?. I just want a way to recover from a misfortune. Also how do you recover an entire system back onto the original hard-drive?.
I asked this question on the freeBSD section of these forums. The reply i got had to do with backing up over the network. While i really appreciate the answer i got, i would like to know how you back up and restore an entire OpenBSD system directly to an external usb drive. I haven't found anything about this when googling.

In the FreeBSD section I offered a solution to backup over the network to your Apple box, so you could use the Apple HFS+ formatted external USB drive Because I don't have neither an Apple (my old Apple II obviously doesn't count), nor an HFS+ formatted USB disk, I used OpenBSD as example.

Contrary to popular opinion, Google is a poor choice for searching when it comes to the smaller Unix-like projects. This is true for a number of reasons:

Information found in the wild is rarely dated nor does it reference which version of OpenBSD was used. Because things will have changed, the solution posed is likely wrong.

The author will have likely looked into the problem only far enough to answer their own question. This may (but most likely, not...) translate to other people's hardware or exact question. Since the question they were attempting to answer is likely not yours, their solution will likely be wrong when applied to your problem.

The solution to the problem is to stay with current OpenBSD documentation. Rank-ordering the amount of trust which can be assigned:

The OpenBSD manpages are meant to be the definitive source of truth.

Anything documented on the project's official Website is next in terms of trustworthiness. This includes the official FAQ.

Anything stated by a project developer on the project's official mailing lists.

Anything else should be treated with skeptism -- including anything found on third-party sites such as this one.

For your information, the topic of back-ups is covered in Section 14.10 of the official FAQ.